California ushers in a new era today with one of the the first greenhouse gas emission auctions in the United States. The state passed the Global Warming Solutions Act in 2006, and six years later, the cap and trade program on carbon emissions in the law is operational and ready for action. More than six [...]

Part of the success in beating back efforts to limit election participation in a number of Republican-led states came from the work of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which used its pre-clearance authority under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to block measures that could have disenfranchised minorities, like district-level maps [...]

This will get approximately no attention today, but a federal court in Australia ruled that Standard and Poor’s, the credit rating agency, lied to investors when they awarded their highest, triple-A rating to derivative securities that lost their value within two years of purchase. The court ruled for a series of local councils in Australia, [...]

JPMorgan Chase has sued the former manager of Bruno Iskil, the “London Whale” who executed the “Fail Whale trades” that cost the company as much as $7 billion. Javier Martin-Artajo was the direct supervisor to Iskil in the Chief Investment Office in London. The lawsuit, which was filed in a London court, did not disclose [...]

Among the many battles left to fight for the big banks who committed fraud up and down the mortgage market concerns a series of lawsuits against monoline insurance companies, which provided mortgage bond insurance (and paid out billions in claims) during the housing bubble. Like other investors, bond insurers have sued firms which contributed to [...]

A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, upholding lower-court rulings that found the law, which discriminates against the marriage rights of gays and lesbians, unconstitutional. The author of the opinion, Dennis Jacobs, is a very conservative George H.W. Bush appointee. But even he had [...]

In a significant ruling today, a federal appeals court overturned a conviction of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, obtained through a military commission. Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a George W. Bush appointee seen as a possible conservative Supreme Court justice, wrote in a ruling for a three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court that Hamdan [...]

The Supreme Court will not step in to block early voting hours in Ohio, delivering a win to voting rights advocates and the Obama campaign, which needs the help as polling starts to turn away from them.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has delivered one of the last remaining blows to voter suppression efforts across the country. And this one cements the near-clean sweep for voting rights advocates in litigation. Today, the Sixth Circuit ruled that Ohio, a pivotal state in the Presidential race, must count all provisional ballots where voters [...]

The financial fraud task force can file civil suits for the next 10 years, and they still won’t understand how this will not satisfy homeowners who had everything they’ve ever worked for taken away from them, and who see no complementary losses on the side of those who caused this tragedy in their lives. This is about a month old, but it was updated last week, and the scarred lives of foreclosure fraud victims resonates regardless of date.

With the narrow, potentially confusing but generally beneficial ruling yesterday in the Pennsylvania voter ID case, the trend is confirmed: voting rights activists have successfully fended off a number of voter suppression tactics put forward by Republicans seeking to model the electorate to their benefit in 2012. The result, that Pennsylvanians will not have to [...]